Ferry Beach Conference Center, Saco, Maine
I’m at a religious education conference here at Ferry Beach, leading a week-long workshop on small religious education programs. We had our first session in this workshop today.
My basic contention for this workshop is that small churches are not well-served by the usual Unitarian Universalist (UU) approach to religious education. The usual UU approach to religious education is pretty straightforward: find a printed curriculum guide that you like, buy it, and tell all your volunteer teachers to follow it. Problem is, almost all of the printed curriculum guides that are appropriate for UU religious education are written for churches that have perhaps 50 children in their programs — enough so you can have have 8-12 children in each class, with the classes divided up by age group. But small churches have too few children to divide up by age groups. This is the big problem facing most small church religious education programs — we feel we have to use the existing printed curriculum guides, but they don’t work with the small number of children we have.
So what’s a small church to do?
I propose a different approach for small churches. Instead of letting printed curriculum guides drive what we do in our programs, I propose that we determine our desired educational outcomes, and let those outcomes drive our programs.
I think most of us have the same basic goals for kids in our religious education programs. With minor variations from one congregation to another, we want them to get four basic things:
(1) We want kids to grow up to be Unitarian Universalists. Right now, only about 12% of the adults in our churches grew up as UUs, whereas in UCC churches (our closest church cousins), 44% of the adults grew up in a UCC church. 44% should be our low-end target.
(2) We want kids to have the skills they need to survive and thrive in a religious community. If they’re going to grow up to be UU adults, they have to know how to serve in leadership positions, how to speak in public, how to sing from a hymnal, how to further their own spiritual growth, etc.
(3) We want kids to have basic religious literacy, compatible with the society they’re living in. So they need to know all the Bible stories they’re going to run into in English-language literature, and they need to know the basic stories of other world religions as well.
And (4) we want kids to have fun, to enjoy coming to church.
Once we have these goals in mind, creating a religious education program to meet those goals turns out to be pretty straightforward. (The interesting thing is that most printed curriculum guides that we have been relying on in the past typically only help us reach the third goal, helping kids achieve religious literacy.) Once you know your desired outcomes, we can release the creativity and energy of volunteers to meet these goals. Of course, the devil is in the details — that’s why this is a week-long workshop, so we can dig into those details.
Participant reactions: The participants all come from smaller churches with relatively small religious education programs. They have all experienced how the available printed curriculum guides are not designed for small churches. They understood how specifying outcomes, rather than specifying printed curriculum guides, could be a way to drive their religious education programs more effectively.
I’m really looking forward to this series, however long.
Please say there will be some model curricula (in the Maria Harris/philosophical sense) and — even better — a way to tie this into lifelong and professional education.
“Junior church” thoughts welcome, too.
As a 5-year UU and parent of two school-aged kids, I’m all for Goals Three and Four, OK with goal Two, and not at all sure about goal One. I suspect Goal One is a point of conflicting expectations between many UU parents and UU clergy/the UUA. If 88% of our adults aren’t in the church of their childhoods, it’s reasonable to guess that many of them don’t assume their kids will stay in the church of *their* childhoods.
Also, I don’t think the key to achieving Goal One has much to do with RE programming. UU kids come out of our *wonderful* youth programs…youth groups, COA, and OWL…and when they come back to church after college, very little looks familiar. The adult worship structure is static, the music is mostly classical, and they’re getting preached at. When adult UU worship participants get to speak (outside of candles), they’re usually handed a script. Is it any wonder the (former) kids don’t hang around?
Thanks for sharing this series. Fantastic! Keep it coming!
I am one of those UU kids who came back as an adult with my own kids, and while it was never perfect worship for a young adult, it was home. Then I became a Religious Educator to a congregation with 23 kids. Four years later we have 85 kids. One curriculum I use in the summers that works really well for all ages is Cathy Cartwright’s “Dr. Seuss Saved My Life” (http://www.uucards.org/cartwright.php) It engages kids from 3 to 12 with good but simple activities and wonderful “wondering”. You can drive your program using the goals–that’s great, but having something concrete, on a page, that has a place to actually start helps. It helps a lot.
Have a great week at Ferry Beach!
I question Goal One. Before continuing, I should explain that both my parents found Unitarianism and brought me up in the Youngstown, Ohio congregation. Merger happened when I was in high school; I was LRY president and we ignored it. I met my daughter’s dad at a UU church; her godfather is a UU minister, and at 25 and in the Peace Corps, she feels totally tied to UU. I am entering Meadville Lombard this fall. So I have led a UU life and am devoted to the denomination.
But why, exactly, do we want our kids to settle into UU as adults? Is UU a path or a goal? Surely we want our kinds to find what works for them. Sure, I cringe at the concept of my grandchildren being, oh, Mormons — but hey, my dad’s mother was a dedicated R.C. and she survived my being UU. My life is mine and not hers.
When I came to understand how her concern about my religious identity was not based on property rights (in me) but on sincere concern for my eternal well-being, I could accept it. Accepting it isn’t buying into it, but if my grandmother was secure in her religious beliefs and I demanded that she accept me, shouldn’t I give my own grandchildren the same right I demanded for myself?
“Marketing” is getting heavy use among UUs these days, and as a marketing person, I am glad of it. But consider what marketing wants when it comes to consumer goods. Marketing wants me to buy Tide next time I buy detergent — but it also wants me to stop thinking about what I buy, each time, and simply toss Tide into the shopping cart without thinking further about it.
Given that our product is a moving target in the first place, can we rationally believe that we can plan for our children’s future thinking? The best advertisement for UU to the future is having today’s congregations be loving, accepting communities, places where open, challenging discussion and exploration is nurtured. I also believe that we should aspire to being a religious community within a coherent definition of what a religious community is — we are not a cluster of affinity groups of political activists.
I sharply disagree with Chris, who says “The adult worship structure is static, the music is mostly classical, and they’re getting preached at. When adult UU worship participants get to speak (outside of candles), they’re usually handed a script.” If this is true of his own congregation, he should change it or leave, if it’s so bad, and find a place that works. It certainly doesn’t sound like my own congregation or any of the others within 40 miles. If this were what UU handed me, I’d be gone. Chris, why do you bother with a place like that? I wouldn’t.
About Goal Four: I don’t want to suggest it’s okay that kids — or anybody, including Chris — dislike attending UU services. It’s worse for kids because they don’t have a lot of control over where they are. But “fun” is not an adequate guide or goal for us.
UU parents bring their kids to us because they think what we’re discussing is important, and how we discuss it is the correct approach. Within the family (as well as within the congregation) there should be ongoing discussion of why this is important. Parents fail their kids if they don’t make it clear that religion (well defined) is important, and that it’s each individual’s job to soul-search. This may not be fun, and it may not be cool. In fact, in the child’s social circle there may be a lot of “reasons” why attending UU is a waste of time. This is why we’re grownups, and part of the responsibility for our children we’re supposed to take. We need to do a lot more than make a few Sunday hours fun.
Since more than a 1/3 of UUA congregations are small; it makes sense to have plans for small REs.
The four goals are also good – I would agree that RE isnt set up currently to retain young folks; after all our larger congregations run them out after 15 minutes. not much continuity there
Diggitt – my bad: I should have made clear that I was talking just about my congregation. I imagine there are many ways that UU congregations do worship that I haven’t seen, and that would be more appealing to young adults. As to why I stay, it’s pretty simple: it’s my local church, and these are my people. The worship hasn’t been a strong connection for me, but many other programs and activities have been wonderful.
Chris @ 2 — You write: “UU kids come out of our *wonderful* youth programs…youth groups, COA, and OWL…and when they come back to church after college, very little looks familiar. The adult worship structure is static, the music is mostly classical, and they’re getting preached at.”
Right. And we can have equally wonderful youth programs that prepare young people to become adult members of our churches. Attending adult UU church is a learned skill, just as attending UU youth programs is a learned skill. Once you frame the problem this way, any reasonably good teacher (including volunteer teachers) can create a fabulous program to teach kids how to be a part of adult church.
Diggit @ 4 — You ask: “But why, exactly, do we want our kids to settle into UU as adults?”
Consider the alternatives. Alternative 1: If our kids don’t become UU adults, they could join the dominant religious tradition in this country, which is conservative Christianity. I don’t want them to do that.
Alternative 2: If our kids don’t become UU adults, they could just stop going to church altogether. But I believe church is a good thing (after all, I go to church regularly), and it would hypocritical of me to tell kids that they should not do what I think is good for me.
Alternative 3: If our kids don’t become UU adults, perhaps they will jion another, more “acceptable” religion. Like Buddhism, or Quakerism, or whatever. But if you want them to join one of those other religions, then what you should be doing is taking them to a different religious community every year, so they can sample each one.
Alternative 4: You sum it up in this statement: “UU parents bring their kids to us because they think what we’re discussing is important, and how we discuss it is the correct approach.” This is the approach that says that UU churches are not really religious institutions, but rather discussion groups about religion. I’m afraid this is the dominant approach among UUs — but I think it’s a bullshit approach, and a total cop-out — instead of doing religion, we just talk about it? I don’t want to have any part of such an organization, and in my view it’s not a religion, it’s just a discussion group.
So my choice is to tell our kids that we value Unitarian Universalism as a religion, and we value them, and because we value both we want them to grow up to be Unitarian Universalists.
Thank you for this thread. It is both interesting and insightful.
Great answers Dan, I don’t always totally agree with you, but I definitely respect your openness and honesty.
I,too, think church can and Should be FUN and spiritual, for all!
in Peace,
Sheila
Hey Sheila, good to hear from you!
You write: “I don’t always totally agree with you, but I definitely respect your openness and honesty.”
And that’s exactly the kind of response I’m hoping for. I hope no one agrees with me entirely — not only am I often wrong, but also every congregation is a little different, and some of the things I talk about simply wouldn’t work in certain congregations. But I feel we need to have this kind of conversation, and hash things out in open conversations, so that we can all work towards making church “FUN and spiritual, for all!”